Sir John Gielgud, OM

Sir John Gielgud, who has died aged 96, was challenged only by Laurence Oliver
for the title of greatest English actor of the 20th century.

In the 1930s Gielgud was recognised as the unchallenged master in classical roles. If, subsequently, he yielded this reputation to Olivier (to whom, in act of symbolic homage, he presented a sword that had once belonged to Edmund Kean), no one matched Gielgud for elegance, sensitivity and intellect.

The essence of his art lay in his voice, which Alec Guinness once described as "a silver trumpet muffled in silk". Latterly, though, Gielgud confessed to having relied too much on its effect.

As a young man he hardly bothered to adapt his physique to his roles. "He held his emperor-like head higher than high, rather thrown back," wrote Guinness, "and carried himself with ramrod straightness. He walked, or possibly tripped, with slightly bent knees to counteract a childhood tendency to flat-footedness.

"His arm movements were inclined to be jerky, and his large bony hands a little stiff. A suggestion of fluidity in his gestures was imparted by his nearly always carrying, when on stage, a big white silk handkerchief."

Ivor Brown was more blunt. "He has the most meaningless legs imaginable," he commented after seeing Gielgud's Romeo in 1924.

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Gielgud himself admitted he could never play peasants or workmen or anything in dialect; equally, it was impossible to imagine him as an earthy Falstaff or a martial Henry V. Moreover an element of glitziness sometimes appeared; Alan Bennett has written of "an iron streak of tinsel that runs through Gielgud's character".

Yet he was wonderfully gifted in the delivery of Shakespeare's verse. He made his reputation at the Old Vic between 1929 and 1931 - above all in Hamlet, but also as Romeo, Richard II and Prospero.

In 1930 James Agate proclaimed that Gielgud's Hamlet was "the high-water mark of English Shakespearian acting of our time". Gielgud played the Prince in four more productions: under his own direction at the New Theatre in 1934; in New York in 1936; at Elsinore in 1939; and, in 1944, in George Rylands's version at the Haymarket.

Gielgud celebrated his career as a Shakespearian actor with a one-man show, Ages of Man, first at Edinburgh in 1957, then in the West End and on tour in England and America.

With Gielgud's apotheosis came a host of anecdotes about his off-stage persona. He was celebrated for his gaffes, though it was a moot question whether they derived from honesty, malice or impatience; certainly he was never shy of repeating his faux pas.

A favourite story concerned a lunch with a playwright called Edward Knoblock, who asked Gielgud whom he was waving at when he came in. "He's the second biggest bore in London," Gielgud announced. "Oh really, said his companion. "And who's the biggest bore in London?"

"Why, Edward Knoblock, of course," Gielgud said. Then, realising that he had put his foot in it, "Not you of course. The other Edward Knoblock."

It surely cannot have been an accident when he told Elizabeth Taylor: "I don't know what's happened to Richard Burton. I think he married some terrible film star and had to live abroad."

No reputation was safe from his barbs. Travelling down with Orson Welles for a weekend at the Oliviers', Gielgud asked his companion what he was doing in England. "I'm going to play Othello", Welles replied. Gielgud was aghast: "What, on the stage? In London?"

By then Gielgud's own stage reputation was established not only as a Shakespearian but also as a superlative comedian. In Tyrone Guthrie's production of The School for Scandal (1937) he revelled in the perfidy of Joseph Surface.

As John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest (Lyric, Hammersmith, 1930, and in his own production at the Globe in 1944) Gielgud was at once stylish and unforced.

Both as actor and director Gielgud had a special affinity with Chekhov. In Michael Saint-Denis's 1938 production of Three Sisters his Vershinin exposed the character's egotism and vanity. With the same director in 1961 he won sympathy as Gaev, the garrulous old bore in The Cherry Orchard.

Though an avid cinemagoer, Gielgud appeared in only a few films before the Second World War. He was in the silent Who Is The Man? in 1924. He later appeared as Inigo Jollifant in J B Priestley's The Good Companions (1932) and as Ashenden in Hitchcock's The Secret Agent (1936).

After the war Gielgud was still seen only fleetingly on screen, notably as Cassius in Julius Caesar (1953), and as Clarence in Olivier's version of Richard III (1955).

From the 1960s, though, he began to take on a number of small parts. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Louis VII in Becket (1964), and played Sir Francis Hinsley, doyen of the English colony in Hollywood, in The Loved One (1965) - a part that gave him fine opportunities as a corpse, pulling faces at the touch of the embalmer's fingers.

In 1966 Gielgud was Henry IV in Orson Welles's Chimes At Midnight. Two years later he featured as a hopelessly vague Lord Raglan in The Charge of the Light Brigade. In 1969 he played Count Berchtold in Oh! What a Lovely War.

By the 1970s Gielgud seemed indifferent whether he played in good or bad films. But in 1976 he found one of his greatest screen roles, in Alain Resnais's Providence. Gielgud was Clive Langham, a foul-mouthed novelist, high on self-disgust. Even when soliloquising on an outdoor lavatory with his trousers down, he contrived to bring a measure of dignity into the last moments of a ruined life.

Perhaps Gielgud's nadir in films was in the tawdry Caligula (1979). But two years later he won an Oscar for his performance as Hobson, butler to a New York layabout (Dudley Moore) in Arthur. It was strange that this slight film made him universally known after six decades as a leading stage actor.

In 1991 Gielgud played the central role in Prospero's Books, Peter Greenaway's version of The Tempest; his appearance nude did not inhibit his command of the verse.

MEANWHILE, in parallel with his development as a film actor, Gielgud had succeeded in finding a new direction on stage. Not until 1953 did he appear in a contemporary play, as a failed diplomat in the sub-Chekhovian A Day by the Sea.

Other modern parts followed - in Noël Coward's Nude With Violin (1956) and Graham Greene's The Potting Shed (1958) - but it was not until 1968 and Alan Bennett's Forty Years On, in which he played the nostalgia-ridden headmaster at Albion School, that he triumphed in a contemporary play. All Gielgud's lines were perfectly inflected to draw out the last syllable of wit. The great classical actor made a dignified ass of himself, and enjoyed it enormously.

Thereafter he went from strength to strength in modern plays. In David Storey's Home (1970) he and Ralph Richardson were two old men chatting away about nothing in particular.

In 1975 Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, directed by Peter Hall for the National Theatre at the Old Vic, proved another triumph for Gielgud and Richardson. As the slatternly poet Spooner, Gielgud transformed himself physically, adopting gold-rimmed spectacles, lank dishevelled hair and even a protuberant stomach. He caught the vulnerability that lay beneath the character's surface arrogance with all his accustomed subtlety.

"Now that he appears to regard himself with a sense of humour", Laurence Olivier commented, "he has become a much finer actor."

Gielgud was also an outstanding director. The seasons he ran at the New Theatre in 1934-35, at the Queen's in 1937-38 and at the Haymarket in 1944-45 can now be seen as precursors of the National Theatre.

He was exceptionally generous in promoting the careers of other actors. Many who flourished under his tutelage in the 1930s - Michael Redgrave, Harry Andrews and Anthony Quayle among them - became the stars of Stratford in the 1950s. George Devine, who had been in his company at the Queen's Theatre in 1937-38, would lead the post-war theatrical revolution at the Royal Court.

Gielgud's style as a director could be disconcerting. "What happened to you," he demanded of the young Alec Guinness, Osric in his 1934 production of Hamlet. "I thought you were rather good. You're terrible. Oh go away. I don't want to see you again."

"Excuse me, Mr Gielgud, Guinness asked next day, "but am I fired?" "No! Yes! No! Of course not. But go away. Come back in a week. Get someone to teach you how to act." When Guinness returned, his performance was heaped with praise, though he could not see that he was doing anything different.

In 1957 Gielgud directed Berlioz's The Trojans at Covent Garden. Unable to make himself heard above the orchestra and chorus, he shouted: "Oh stop! Please stop that dreadful music."

The next year he directed Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise. "What on earth are you all doing?" he shrieked from the stalls. "This is a nightmare." "We're doing exactly what you told us," the actors protested. "You shouldn't have listened to me," returned Gielgud, "you know I can't direct." Yet the results were invariably praised for their sensitivity and insight.

Arthur John Gielgud was born on April 14 1904, the son of Frank Gielgud, a stockbroker whose mother had been a successful actress in Lithuania, and of Kate Terry Lewis, the niece of Ellen Terry.

It became a commonplace that John Gielgud owed his sensibility - and not least his talent for bursting into tears at will - to his Terry inheritance. But his face could also become a cold and remote mask, a talent possibly derived from his paternal ancestors, Polish cavalry officers.

The boy went to Hillside preparatory school, where he played the Mock Turtle (a part he repeated on television in 1966), Humpty Dumpty, Shylock and Mark Antony, before going on to Westminster. By the age of 17 he had determined to become an actor. His parents, who wanted him to go to Oxford, objected, but he mollified them by promising to become an architect if he had not succeeded on stage by the age of 25.

Gielgud won a scholarship to a Dramatic Academy run by Lady Benson, who remarked that he walked like a cat with rickets. Nevertheless, in 1921 he played the English herald in Henry V at the Old Vic.

His first professional engagement was as an understudy on a provincial tour of J B Fagan's The Wheel. In 1923 he won a scholarship to Rada, and appeared as the poet-butterfly in The Insect Play by the brothers Capek. "I am surprised the audience did not throw things at me," he later remarked.

He also secured a small part in John Drinkwater's Robert E Lee at Drury Lane, and understudied Claude Rains, who had taught him at Rada, in the same play. Interviewed years later in America, Gielgud affected ignorance about Rains's subsequent career in films: "I think he failed and went to America."

In 1924 Gielgud joined the Oxford Playhouse Company, and over the next three seasons played numerous classical roles, excelling as Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard.

Gielgud laid the basis of his West End reputation in 1926 when he took over from Noël Coward as Lewis Dodd in The Constant Nymph. Two years later he saw his name in lights for the first time at the Globe (renamed the Gielgud in 1994), though neither the play, Holding Out the Apple, nor his acting were admired. By 1929, however, he was so well known that it was a financial sacrifice to join Lilian Bayliss's company at the Old Vic.

After his triumphs in Shakespeare there, it seemed a comedown to take the part of Inigo Jollifant in The Good Companions in 1931. Two years later, though, he stilled all criticism in the lead of Gordon Daviot's Richard of Bordeaux. "The range of his emotional scope, and the intelligence with which he conceives parts", wrote Desmond MacCarthy, "puts him right at the top of the profession."

In 1935 Gielgud and Laurence Olivier alternated as Romeo and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, under Gielgud's direction - a celebrated production that also featured Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse. This was the only time that Gielgud and Olivier appeared together on stage; though Gielgud spoke the verse better, Olivier was far more convincing as a lover.

AFTER playing the son of Marie Antoinette in the now strikingly named He Was Born Gay (1937), Gielgud embarked on his celebrated season at the Queen's Theatre - though his Richard II was more successful than his Shylock, described by James Agate as "a wet blanket at a party".

In 1938, he appeared in Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus. Two years later he returned to the Old Vic as Lear. "Lear should be an oak," Harley Granville-Barker, who co-directed, told him, "you'll never be that, but we might make something of you as an ash." Gielgud followed this up with an aristocratic portrayal of Prospero in The Tempest.

In July 1940 he played in Noël Coward's Fumed Oak and Hands Across the Sea at the Globe. He returned to directing and acting in Shakespeare, with a five-month tour of Macbeth. The general feeling, which Gielgud shared, was that the production was better than his performance.

In the season that Gielgud organised at the Haymarket in 1944 and 1945 he combined his performance as Hamlet with a bravura parody of it when he played Valentine, who feigns madness, in William Congreve's Love for Love.

James Agate considered Gielgud's Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment (1946) as one of the finest performances of his career.

In 1949 he directed Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning, taking for himself the part of Thomas Mendip, a disillusioned soldier who demands to be hanged for a murder he has not committed.

In 1950 he went to Stratford in Shakespeare, including a delightfully witty Benedict opposite Peggy Ashcroft's Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

Gielgud's second attempt at Lear left critics divided. "King Lear is an Ancient Monument," wrote J C Trewin, "and I am afraid that John Gielgud behaves like a guide who is showing us around."

At the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1953, Gielgud matched his triumph in The Way of the World with his portrayal of Jaffeir in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd.

Off-stage this was a troubled time for Gielgud. In 1953 he was he was fined £10 at West London magistrates' court for "persistently importuning male persons for an immoral purpose". The actor, who had described himself as "a self-employed clerk" pleaded that he was "tired and had had a few drinks" and that he was not responsible for his action.

The incident threatened to wreck his career. John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, fulminated against "moral rot" and urged "decent people" to ostracise such "social lepers".

Theatre audiences proved more charitable. Gielgud was staunchly championed by Sybil Thorndike and Ralph Richardson, with whom he was appearing in A Day by the Sea; the play was warmly received both in Liverpool and at the Haymarket. After the late 1950s, when Gielgud set up home with Martin Hensler, his private life became less turbulent.

In 1955 Gielgud again played Lear, this time in an avant-garde production directed by George Devine and designed by Isamu Noguchi.

Of Gielgud's Prospero in Peter Brook's Stratford production of The Tempest (1957) Kenneth Tynan wrote: "His face is all rigour and pain; his voice all cello and woodwind; the rest of him is totem-pole."

In 1961 Gielgud attempted Othello in Zeffirelli's production at Stratford. But the Moor was beyond his range. "Far from suggesting he could eat Desdemona raw for breakfast," Penelope Gilliatt observed, "he makes one feel he would really like her served on a tray in the library."

The 1960s saw a change of approach. In 1968, at the National Theatre, he was Oedipus in Seneca's brutal tragedy. Though the production was not deemed a success, Peter Brook, the director, managed to release Gielgud from his "great actor" inhibitions, setting him free for the less mannered triumphs of his later years.

Gielgud made one more stab at Prospero on stage, in Peter Hall's controversial production of The Tempest at the Old Vic in 1974. Three years later he took on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the National Theatre. Caesar's assassination, wrote Michael Billington, was "a gratuitous attempt to kill off the best verse-speaker on the English stage".

In 1974 Gielgud and Hensler had moved out of London to a fine house near Thame. The old actor had little time for London's new theatres. "The Barbican looks like a hospital, the National Theatre resembles an aircraft carrier."

His last West End role was Sir Sydney Cockerell in Hugh Whitemore's The Best of Friends in 1988. "The Angel of Death seems quite to have forgotten me," Cockerell reflects at the end of the play. "On the other hand, I might pop off tomorrow - who knows?"

Gielgud's career in films was still very much alive. Among the cameos he played in later life were Lord Irwin in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982); Pfistermeister, one of Ludwig II's ministers (Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson being the others), in Tony Palmer's Wagner (1985); and Sir Leonard Darwin, an honourable diplomat in Plenty (1985) by David Hare.

Gielgud had not appeared on television until 1959, in a version of A Day By The Sea. In the same year, on American television, he appeared as Andrew Crocker-Harris, the failed schoolmaster in The Browning Version, a part originally written with him in mind.

Gielgud's vignette as Charles Ryder's father in Brideshead Revisited (1981) perfectly caught the waspishness of the character.

John Mortimer's Summer's Lease (1989) presented him as the chain-smoking old lecher Haverford Down. Gielgud had come a long way from the Shakespearian idol of the 1930s.

Yet at a 90th birthday celebration in 1994 he appeared, to near universal acclaim, as Lear in the Renaissance Theatre Company's radio production. Gielgud took advantage of the occasion to tell Hello! that he was bored by the Bard and had never understood many of his plays. "I'm able to bolt down a cheap thriller," he confessed, "but I couldn't read Troilus and Cressida with any great pleasure."

In truth, he had always had a practical streak. A young actor once asked him for advice on how to play Lear. "Pick a light Cordelia," came the crisp response.

Gielgud continued to work into his nineties. He had roles in three films in 1997, including David Helfgott's piano tutor in Shine. Last year he appeared in the drama Merlin on television.

Gielgud was knighted in 1953. He was appointed CH in 1977 and OM in 1996.

He published several entertaining volumes of memoirs and a collection of his notes on the theatre in the 1920s.